فصل 41

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

Tanzie

So the uniform for St. Annes is royal blue with yellow piping. You cant hide in a St. Annes blazer. Some girls in my class take them off when theyre going home, but it doesnt bother me. When you work hard to get somewhere, its quite nice to show people where you belong. The funny thing is that when you see another St. Annes student outside school, its the custom to wave to each other. Sometimes its a big wave, like Sritis. Shes my best friend, and she always looks like shes on a desert island trying to attract a passing plane, and sometimes its just a tiny lifting of your fingers down by your school bag, like Dylan Carter, who gets embarrassed about talking to anyone, even his own brother. But everyone does it. You might not know the person waving, but you wave at the person in the uniform. Its what the schools always done. It shows that were all a family, apparently.

I always wave, especially if Im on the bus.

Ed picks me up on Tuesdays and Thursdays because thats when I have maths club and Mum works late at her handyperson thing. She has three people working for her now. She says they work “with her, but shes always showing them how to do stuff and telling them which jobs to go to and Ed says shes still a bit uncomfortable with the idea of being a boss. He says shes getting used to it. He pulls a face when he says it, like Mums the boss of him, but you can tell he likes it.

Since the start of school in September, Mum has taken Friday afternoons off, and she meets me at school and we make biscuits together, just me and her. Its been nice, but Im going to have to tell her Id rather stay late at school, especially now Im going to do my A level in the spring. Dad hasnt had a chance to come down yet, but we Skype every week and he says hes definitely going to. He sold the Rolls to a man at the police pound. Hes got two job interviews next week, and lots of irons in the fire.

Nicky is at sixth-form college in Southampton. He wants to go to art school. He has a girlfriend called Lila, which Mum said was a surprise on all sorts of counts. He still wears lots of eyeliner, but hes letting his hair grow out to its natural color, which is sort of a dark brown. Hes now a whole head taller than Mum and sometimes when theyre in the kitchen he thinks its funny to rest his elbow on her shoulder, like shes a bar or something. He still writes in his blog sometimes, but mostly he says hes too busy and he prefers Twitter these days, so it would be okay if I take it over for a bit. Next week it will be less personal stuff and more about maths. Im really hoping lots of you like maths.

We paid back seventy-seven percent of the people who sent us money for Norman. Fourteen percent said they would rather we just gave the money to charity, and we were never able to trace the other nine percent. Mum says its fine, because the important thing was that we tried, and that sometimes its okay just to accept peoples generosity as long as you say thank you. She said to say thank you to you, if youre one of them, and shell never forget the kindness of strangers.

Ed is here literally all the time. He sold his house at Beachfront and he now owns a really small flat in London, where Nicky and I have to sleep on put-you-up beds when were there, but most of the time he stays with us. He works in the kitchen on his laptop and talks to his friend in London on this really cool set of headphones, and he goes up and down for meetings in the Mini. He keeps meaning to get a new car, as its really hard to fit all of us in when we want to go somewhere, but in a weird way none of us really wants him to. Its kind of nice in the little car, all squashed together, and in that car I dont feel so guilty about the drool.

Norman is happy. He does all the things the vet said hed be able to do, and Mum says thats enough for us. The law of probability combined with the law of large numbers states that to beat the odds, sometimes you have to repeat an event an increasing number of times in order to get you to the outcome you desire. The more you do, the closer you get. Or, as I explain it to Mum, basically, sometimes you just have to keep going.

Ive taken Norman into the garden and thrown the ball for him eighty-six times this week. He still never brings it back.

But I think well get there.